What are start stop continue meetings

This format is frequently used to build the agenda for project retrospective meetings. It’s a great way to help everyone zoom out and think about how to improve the next time. So much so that some leaders also use the same template to take feedback on themselves as a leader. 

I personally love this format because it’s super actionable. If done well, the meeting can end with very specific action items on what you need to do to achieve success. 

How does it work 

You can choose to run this asynchronously or during a live attendance meeting. But its fundamentals remain the same. All participants are asked to list down things that they as a team should -

#1 Start doing

To come up with this list, encourage everyone to - 

• Think about what is missing from the current processes
• Industry best practices that are not implemented within the team 
• Think about what new experiments they should try out. If they work out, those items can be moved into the “continue doing” list the next time

#2 Stop doing

These are items that -

• Didn’t work in this sprint or are no longer working out for the team overall
• Were working before but did not give results this time
• Are inefficient or waste a lot of time and resources

#3 Continue doing 

I am sure you get the gist now! These are things that - 

• Are working really well and they should continue being implemented
• They as a team should double down on

Some stuff to remember

• There are no bad points. Let everything come out in your list, no holds barred.
• The meeting facilitator has a very important job! They have to group the points together, merge duplicate ones and remove the invalid ones. 
• While removing the invalid ones, make sure you talk about it with the person who recommended that point.
• A more advanced version of this is to also assign votes to each point! e.g have multiple people recommended the same “we should stop doing”? Give it higher priority in the meeting discussion.